ABSTRACT
Social science is like all science in that even a failed experiment holds heuristic value. Tellingly, the scorecard of experimental communes and their efforts to engineer America in miniature is chock-full of spectacular failures. Insofar as this ever more rapidly changing conditions demand ever more rapid adjustment, the first order of business for any utopian community ought to be planning the reform of the original blueprint. Vonnegut travels in time to devolve humankind as people know into blubbery seals. Plato contends in Ion that, appearances to the contrary, poets are not the makers of their verses. The power of language in action is readily apparent in the court of law. Sworn testimonies, factual cross-examinations, and doubt-sowing rebuttals are only some of the stories circulating in the legal setting, with fortunes and sometimes even lives hanging in the balance. The first one interrogates many of the assumptions traditionally central to the utopian project.
